Haascope by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
By Andy Haas, an experimental particle physics professor: as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/andy-haas.html What an awesome dude!
Video 1.
Haasoscope prototype, 2 4-channel boards
. Source.
Cat 5e by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is the most common home "ethernet cable" as of 2024. It is essentially ubiquitous. According to the existing Ethernet physical layer, the maximum speed supported is 2.5 Gbit/s.
MAC address by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Hardcoded and unique network addresses for every single device on Earth.
Started with 48 bits (6 bytes), usually given as 01:23:45:67:89:AB but people now encouraged to use 64-bit ones.
How they are assigned: www.quora.com/How-are-MAC-addresses-assigned Basically IEEE gives out the 3 first bytes to device manufacturers that register, this is called the organizationally unique identifier, and then each manufacturer keeps their own devices unique.
BackRub by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This was the original name of Google Search.
One wonders if this name has some influence from the LGBT culture in San Francisco! The sexual innuendo is palpable.
"Back" is of course a reference to "backlinks", since Google Search relies on incoming links (AKA backlinks) to a webpage to determine its importance.
Google Books by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
They scanned a bunch of books, and then allowed search results to hit them. They then only show a small context around the hit to avoid copyright infringement.
Bibliography:
csvtool by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A compiled executable under /usr/bin/csvtool, has an Ubuntu 23.04 package: manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lunar/en/man1/csvtool.1.html
There seems to be no sane filtering mechanism however: stackoverflow.com/questions/46540752/using-csvtool-call-to-filter-csv-in-bash
Ciro Santilli was contributing to this, when CommonMark left private mode and killed it, thus wasting many hours of Ciro's time.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact